Downloading species range maps from IUCN
Luis Amador
2022-05-10
Overview
This is a very small tutorial to access to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) range maps of species directly from IUCN Red List of threatened species portal https://www.iucnredlist.org.
This is part of the activities within a National Science Foundation (NSF) project awarded to professor Lisa Barrow, the project is named Determinants of amphibian genomic diversity: Integrating traits, phylogeny and geography.
I have designed some steps to follow:
Steps
- Login in to IUCN Red List portal ‘https://www.iucnredlist.org/users/sign_in’ to access range maps of amphibian species (Figure 1).
You can login with my email address = amadoroyola@gmail.com and using the password = amphibia2022.
- Once logged in we can start to search for species information on the IUCN Red List portal writing the scientific name of a species (e.g. Allobates brunneus) (Figure 2).
- In this step we can see important information of the species of interest, such as the common name, the name of the authors who did the Red List Assessment, and its conservation status, in this case Allobates brunneus is categorized as Leas Concern (LC) (Figure 3).
Here is important to collect some information in this step. We can create a matrix in Excel with two variables collected from this step, the scientific name “species” and the conservation status “IUCN” (Table 1).
Table 1 . Amphibians species and their conservation status acoording to IUCN.
| species | IUCN |
|---|---|
| Allobates brunneus | LC |
| … | … |
- The next step is do click in ‘Download’ and choose the option ‘Range data - Polygons (SHP)’ (Figure 4).
- Before the download start, IUCN asks about the intended usage of the data requested. We can quickly answer the question with this: “We are using this data in an NSF project where we are studying determinants of amphibian genetic diversity. Thank you.” (Figure 5).
- Click on ‘Next’ button (Figure 6).
- New question from IUCN. Now we have to click in ‘Yes’ since our requested is to be used for academic, research and educational proposes (Figure 7).
- Agree the terms of use (marking the check box)and finishing the request for data (click in the ‘Finish’ button) (Figure 8).
- Now is time to go back to our main account page to see all our downloads by clicking in ‘Go to account page’ button (Figure 9).
- Now in the account page we can see all the saved downloads organized from the recent to the oldest (Figure 10).
Here is not necessary to do click in ‘Download’ because a link to download the information is sent to my email, in addition the information remains saved and could be downloaded at any time.
However, if you want to explore the downloaded information you can do click in ‘Download’ and save the zipped folder in your favorite directory. You can see a folder with different files like showed in Figure 11.
Finally, if you want to explore more and want to visualize the downloaded polygon (Figure 12); an excellent option is to use QGIS https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html. QGIS is a professional GIS application that is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
